- Context: In the Oakland inner city community, teens, specifically teens of color, & especially black teens are engulfed in a life full of violence, adversity, poverty, & a constant struggle for survival against a city that seems to want all but success for them and their developing lives. This project was an opportunity to negate the media's harmful, negative, stereotypical portrayal of them through their own, honest, personal words & stories.
- Content: This project provided the opportunity for the greater Oakland community (as well as whoever was reached via the news broadcast of the event) to hear the truth of the lives of inner-city teens fighting against a system built to make them fail, & give up. It held the potential to dispell the smokescreen of "ghetto life" & replace it with the actual stories of these teenagers' nuanced, valuable lives.
- Form: Community-based art was definitely the overall medium used to execute this project. More specifically, a public demonstration using the unconventional aspect (the teens) as the control & the visiting audience as the variable (being that they had no control over what they would hear, from who, & how it would affect them). It could also be labeled as performance art, or even live theatre.
- Stakeholders: The groups/individuals invested in the outcome of the project are Suzanne Lacy, her partner Chris, the team of teachers & students involved in the developmental phase of the project, the teen performers themselves, & the Oakland inner-city community.
- Audience: The project was aimed at anyone in the Oakland community (most imminently, but obviously also the hope was that it would transcend that boundary in some way) who had an outside view of what life was like for inner-city teens every day. The affluent Oakland population was a special target, being that the stereotypes they associated with teens of color/black teens were the most potent & blinding.
- Engagement Strategies: Multiple strategies were used to garner and maintain engagement. Fundraising was a big one; people donated over $100K to a project they found some level of importance & necessity in. The student/teacher planning board was another, involving minds from both perspectives. The teens themselves were perhaps the most important, as this offered them the opportunity to share their truth, surrounded by their peers: people who they could easily relate to and find comfort in discussing more trepidatious subjects with. Finally, the audience was engaged I think in the most interesting way, by leaving them to their own devices & forcing them to wander & make the choice to listen in, unknowing as to what they would hear.
- Goal: This project aimed to bring visibility & positivity into the lives of the teen actors. It also had the goal of translating that refreshed, different view of these teens, their lives, their homes, their neighborhoods, & their values, to the outside communities that had incorrect & misinformed preconceived notions about them.
- Values: The project's guiding values were that of honesty, transparency, support, encouragement, strength, positivity, & an extreme dedication to create imminent social change. All of these were expressed the best, in my opinion, in the way that they involved the teens in every step of the process, especially the moment in the film where the organizers willingly accepted feedback from the teens as they began to feel othered & marginalized towards the end stages of the process. That was one of the most striking & altruistic moments for me.
- Resources: Money (from fundraising), access to printing materials & facilities, boardroom/classroom access, classroom supplies, access to the parking structure, ability to & access to rent cars, a full staff, access to the school systems, willing teen participants, the support & trust of the city (especially because there were no police present), the ability to bring the news outlets to cover the project, and so many more...
- Outcomes: Watching the peoples' short testimonials after completing their experiences at The Roof is on Fire tell all in terms of the results of the endeavor. Countless people mentioned strong emotional reactions, both positive & negative, to the things they heard from the teens. Audience members spoke of discovering new aspects of inner-city teen life that they had never known or considered, changing perspectives on the truth of the given circumstances of growing up in the households & family situations that these teens did, & most importantly, I think, the understanding of a need for drastic change in the level of support for, encouragement of, protection of, uplifting of, & a huge increase in the quality of life for these teens.
“With five percent of the world's population, the US incarcerates 25 percent of the world's prisoners” (Daisy Hudson, Noisey Magazine. 2014). That same year “African Americans constituted 2.3 million, or 34%, of the total 6.8 million correctional population, though African Americans and Hispanics make up approximately 32% of the US population, they comprised 56% of all incarcerated people in 2015 (NAACP). The prison system in America serves not as a correctional facility, but a container for which black bodies are buried alive. The conditions of which inmates are kept, the disparity in numbers and portrayal of those incarcerated. There is no question that factors such as education, employment, mental and physical health; the lack of access to such resources targets and propels African Americans through the pipeline to prison. In our history, it seems that prison, or largely the criminalization of African Americans, Black men in particularly, has been used as a tactic of oppr...
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